Mr. Yelverton did not return home from his mission until Mrs. Duff-Scott's farewell kettle-drum was in full blast. He found the two drawing-rooms filled with a fashionable crowd; and the hum of sprightly conversation, the tinkle of teaspoons, the rustle of crisp draperies, the all-pervading clamour of soft feminine voices, raised in staccato exclamations and laughter, were such that he did not see his way to getting a word in edgeways. Round each of the Yelverton sisters the press of bland and attentive visitors was noticeably great. They were swallowed up in the compact groups around them. This I am tempted to impute to the fact of their recent elevation to rank and wealth, and to a certain extent it may be admitted that that fact was influential. And why not? But in justice I must state that the three pretty Miss Kings had become favourites in Melbourne society while the utmost ignorance prevailed as to their birth and antecedents, in conjunction with the most exact knowledge as to the narrowness of their incomes. Melbourne society, if a little too loosely constituted to please the tastes of a British prig, born and bred to class exclusiveness, is, I honestly believe, as free as may be from the elaborate snobbishness with which that typical individual (though rather as his misfortune than his fault) must be credited. In Mrs. Duff-Scott's drawing-room were numerous representatives of this society--its most select circle, in fact--numbering amongst them women of all sorts; women like Mrs. Duff-Scott herself, who busied themselves with hospitals and benevolent schemes, conscious of natural aspirations and abilities for better things than dressing and gossiping and intriguing for social triumphs; women like Mrs. Aarons, who had had to struggle desperately to rise with the "cream" to the top of the cup, and whose every nerve was strained to retain the advantages so hardly won; women to whom scandal was the breath of their nostrils, and the dissemination thereof the occupation of their lives; women whose highest ambition was to make a large waist into a small one; women with the still higher ambition to have a house that was more pleasant and popular than anybody else's. All sorts and conditions of women, indeed; including a good proportion of those whose womanhood was unspoiled and unspoilable even by the deteriorating influences of luxury and idleness, and whose intellect and mental culture and charming qualities generally were such as one would need to hunt well to find anything better in the same line elsewhere. These people had all accepted the Miss Kings cordially when Mrs. Duff-Scott brought them into their circle and enabled the girls to do their duty therein by dressing well, and looking pretty, and contributing a graceful element to fashionable gatherings by their very attractive manners. That was all that was demanded of them, and, as Miss Kings only, they would doubtless have had a brilliant career and never been made to feel the